OBJECTIVES

ENGAGE aims at translating the wealth of data emerging from large-scale research efforts in molecular epidemiology into information of direct relevance to future advances in clinical medicine.

The overall objectives of ENGAGE are to:

Establish a supranational framework for research into genetic and genomic epidemiology
ENGAGE aims at assembling the best researchers, the best sample and data sets in areas of primary focus (cardiovascular, metabolic and behavioural diseases), the best ethical guidance and the best analytical and translational platforms.

Investigate the origins and causes of diseases
ENGAGE concentrates its efforts around metabolic and cardiovascular disease phenotypes initially, due to their importance for European and global health. The methods developed and lessons learned will also be applied to a wider range of disease areas including behavioural and psychiatric phenotypes during the course of the project.

ENGAGE aims at evaluating the clinical and public health relevance of the novel disease and trait-susceptibility genes that we identify, and at demonstrating that these findings can be used as diagnostic indicators for common diseases. This will help us to better understand risk factors, disease progression and why people differ in responses to treatment.

Improve the sharing and integration of large data sets
Collectively the ENGAGE consortium partners have access to an extensive range of well phenotyped and catalogued population cohorts representing >600,000 subjects and including a number of ethnically homogeneous population sets. Furthermore, Genome wide association data (GWA) are available for >100,000 of these subjects.

The ENGAGE project aims at bringing together these datasets efficiently to perform large scale integrated genetic association analyses in order to accelerate discovery of novel disease-susceptibility variants undetectable in individual studies.

Explore key methodological questions to European research
What are the consequences of ethnic and environmental heterogeneity for gene discovery efforts and the allelic architecture of common disease? How to develop novel technological and statistical approaches for the study of human disease? ENGAGE aims at exploring these questions and find new ways of providing recommendations for methodological issues within European research in genetic and genomic epidemiology.

Facilitate translation of findings to the clinical area
The ENGAGE project aims at disseminating research outputs to both the scientific and non-specialist audience and at contributing to international efforts in large population cohorts by maintaining very close contacts with the P3G effort (Public Population Projects in Genomics).

The results of the first round of ENGAGE led meta-analyses have already been published in high profile journals and have raised interest in the mainstream press, resulting in a dissemination of key messages to the general public.

DOWNLOAD EXECUTIVE SUMMARY, PERIOD 1-3 (1.1.2008-31.12.2011)